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Archipelago Books

Say Fire

Say Fire

by Selma Asotić

$16.00
$16.00
Available as E-Book Poets & Poetry
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In a pocket, Asotić finds a brood of planets. In the wind, a cathedral of voice. And in the throat, a thorn bush hums. She slakes her thirst with briny water, and later, tucks a thorn under the tongue. Ready to speak. The poet’s voice is warm with questions, recursions, and doubts. “Do you remember nothing from your life?” she asks, observing the challenge of memory and family history in the wake of the Bosnian War. The poet recalls men returning from war, with bodies no bigger than marbles in a palm. A bullet may pierce through a door and become a peephole. Through it, Asotić can see the myths of war – that shrapnel makes men celestial – or fragments of her own mayhemmed matrilineage. Her lines, blossoming and chimeric, search for a home, and a mother, in peacetime. Her language is alchemized into the corporeal, illumining the bodies that touch and leave us, like waves washing away their gestures.

Additional Book Information

Series: Archipelago Books
ISBN: 9781962770439
Pages: 64
Publication Date:

Praise

The tender depiction of interior space that runs through Say Fire is like a refuge from history.
—Susan Stewart

Words "are like teeth," our speaker tells us, preparing us for the sharpened incisors these poems will bare. Steeped in the fear of not being able to bear witness, the words here are not only like teeth; they are also like rocks holding the fluttering world down, like pinpoints of light, like little detonations clearing out a space so that the real may appear. While a suicide bomber watches syndicated comedy, the intelligence of the poem notes, "safety pins, shawls / caught in car wheels, knots, snowdrops, / I have a head," and we are, alongside this speaker, awake to the whole world.
—Eleni Sikelianos

Rich and multi-dimensional . . . Asotić’s work presents a layered portrait of consciousness that readers can find themselves in and find opportunity to be challenged.
—Stacy Mattingly

The concept of home is highly coveted and rarely concrete, but writer Selma Asotić explores the possibility that home is not entirely physical. As a bilingual poet from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Asotić has grappled relentlessly with a sense of belonging, finding refuge in the art of literature.
—Daily Free Press

In Say Fire, Selma Asotić’s masterful debut, the flames of language present a Mobius strip of history and memory and the never-endingness of war. “How fast the shadows lengthen when you try to outrun them,” she writes. And while the outrunning may be impossible, the witnessing, with its hamster wheel of suffering, grenades and loss––and also love and tenderness and resolve––is not. In this arresting reckoning, Asotić writes: I think of you/ in as many ways as the rain falls. It’s a searing rain and fire she gives us, and an all-too-timely reminder of the untiring half-life and brutality of war.
—Andrea Cohen

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